wanted to write the history of Kalinga region and seems to have collected material for this, but his notebooks were lost in a journey. Hence the history of Kalinga region never saw the light of the day.
The manner in which Gurajada scribbled the diaries was peculiar to him. Important events were cryptically noted. Even the death of Ananda Gajapati, an event that caused enormous grief and personal loss to him, was given only one sentence (May 1897). Again at the end of the year he wrote something like a homage to the Maharajah. Gurajada briefly noted even the tragic and sudden death of his father, the marriage of his daughter and nowhere did he mention the death of his brother. (Did it happen in the year when the diary was not written?) He scribbles R.S. cryptically for the courtesan Ramaswamy, for whose details we have to depend on his notes. His conversations with prominent people like William Miller, Principal of Madras Christian College, Justice S. Subramania Iyer, Madan Mohan Malaviya, founder of Benares Hindu University, and eminent Bengali scholars like Gurudas Banerjee also found only a passing mention each. In the diary of 1897, the year in which the first edition of Kanyasulkam was published, nothing about the event finds place, except that it was presented to the Joint Manager of the Samsthanam.
George Sampson writes, “Diaries as a form of expression suited to certain natures have been common in many ages and they have been used normally as the material for reminiscences, autobiographies and biographies. A few have been printed in full and of these few, the greatest are the diaries of John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, the first personal record of events and the record of a personal revelation of the frankest kind”.11 Anandarangam Pillai’s diaries during the early period of East India Company in Madras Presidency are a source of history for scholars. Anne Frank’s diaries are a treasure by themselves. Diaries thus also contribute a solid base for personality assessment. The tradition of writing diaries is not exclusive to Western culture. Even though the coinage of word might differ and vary, the records of many historical, political and literary works can be called diaries. In Bengal this tradition seems to have started in the beginning of the twentieth century. In Andhradesa, this genre was taken up by two contemporary stalwarts, Gurajada and Kandukuri,12 quite unwittingly
